This chapter indicates the overview of distance education and the importance of distance education in global education. Distance learning becomes an alternative to traditional classrooms. Students can benefit from the flexibility that comes with distance learning, and for students who do not have the time or money to attend the traditional schools, distance learning can provide a path to higher education. Distance learning can increase the opportunities for students across the globe, ensuring that students do not have to choose a school based on its location. Distance-based learning offers more flexibility to students in terms of how and when they take classes. The chapter argues that facilitating distance education has the potential to improve educational performance and gain sustainable competitive advantage in global education.
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For the last twenty years, many universities and educational institutions tried to find the new ways and methods in order to effectively utilize the Internet-based technologies in teaching and learning through the distance education initiatives (Altunisik, 2013). The increasing educational demand, time limitations, and geographical obstacles practically increase the demand of distance education (Ilgaz & Askar, 2013). With the development of Internet technologies, online distance education is becoming an important format for teaching, learning, and instruction (Li, 2007). Internet technologies are realized that they can employ in the training system and they are recognized as the educational facilitator in the distance education (Çelik, Ferikoglu, Kiraz, Albayrak, & Ekiz, 2013). Distance education, having arisen at the end of the 20th century, enters the 21 century as one of the most effective systems of learners' training (Lenar, Artur, Ullubi, & Nailya, 2014).
Education in the 21st century requires the implementation of innovation in the teaching technology (Malganova & Rahkimova, 2015). In parallel with the recent developments, education has initiated to utilize the Internet media (Çelik et al., 2013). Distance education exploits the Internet intended for course supply for the students and educators in the different locations (Paksoy, 2015). Learners electronically interconnect with the educators in global education (Sims, Dobb, & Hand, 2002). Regarding distance education, course content can be presented through the recorded lectures, slide presentations, text-based documents, interactive online activities of various forms, audio files, video files, pod casts, wikis, live chat sessions, online discussions, live online presentations, videoconferencing, and other methods. Video cases can capture the complexity of the classroom context and provide the efficient way to expose the learners to the authenticity of the classroom (Bayram, 2013).